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These are exciting times for marketers wanting to get involved with social media. Virtually all the major social networks are opening up their platform with their own APIs or adopting open ‘standards’ like OpenSocial. This means more opportunities for marketers to develop meaningful, interactive, social applications to bring their brands to life.

It’s also exciting to see that when it comes to serving advertising to social network users, advertisers are starting to get that they can’t just re-purpose their old banner ads – but need to engage their audience in meaningful ways.

While building custom social applications from scratch is a bold move that may pay off for many brands, the cost and time to market for applications is far greater than traditional ads.

It’s fantastic to see the variety of hybrid ad-widget formats that are becoming available to advertisers, including Linkstorm’s PUP, Google GagdetAds, Gigya, Clearspring and Kickapps widgets.

However, it is still incumbent on the advertisers to take advantage of the interactive possibilities these formats present and not forget that they also need to find ways for users to personalize and make these widgets “their own”.

The last thing we need is another distribution network of ads where the brand remains front and center.

Large-scale social network advertising across twitter and facebook are being a part of Social Media Optimization. Advertising is becoming more social across all areas, including TV, billboards, banner ads and print, as well as new online formats.